The World as I Found It (17 page)

And then she marries the king, prompted Russell, recalling the outlines of the tale.

And she has a son, resumed Wittgenstein. And then the little man, he returns one day to take the child. Now! Here we get at the meat of the tale. The queen begs and cries. Very well, says Rumpelstiltskin. You can keep the boy if my name you can tell me.
Grimelthorpe? Grimelwald? Osward?
Name after name she tries. She sends men across the land to find new names. The little man, so happy he is …
No name works!

Looking up impishly, Wittgenstein recited,
Ach, wie gut, dass niemand weiss, dass ich Rumpelstilzchen heiss
— Oh, how good it is, that nobody knows that
I
am called Rumpelstiltskin. And as Wittgenstein said this, Russell felt that the truth was that he, Wittgenstein, was the confounding Rumpelstiltskin!
He
was the riddle, withholding the magic name. And, like the dwarf, Wittgenstein saw, quite in spite of his more shrinking impulses, that he did indeed have Russell in his thrall as he said, Profound Truth! Just like her, we are, Russell. Just like her we work to break this spell upon us! The logic of our language, this is our confounding Rumpelstiltskin — this is what keeps us in its spell. And only the right — the perfect answers will free us.

But there you go! cried Russell, leaning forward in his chair. For you the answer must be
perfect
— why? Can there be no middle or temporary ground while we whittle away at the problem?

But no! cried Wittgenstein. This is the point, there must be
the
key. You do not
half
unlock the lock — the door opens either or it does not. And then, Russell, said Wittgenstein with a grin, then you must hope we have not spent our life struggling to open the wrong door!

* * *

Of course, Russell had other things on his mind besides Wittgenstein: holiday worries, money worries and now even deadline worries connected with writing, for money, his first fast and popular book,
The Problems of Philosophy.

Aware of his continuing difficulties, the Whiteheads insisted that he have Christmas dinner at their house, and Russell readily agreed, accepting with more relief than pride would have permitted him in better times. But then having gotten himself a berth for the holiday, Russell thought guiltily of Wittgenstein, who no doubt would be spending the day alone. Might he angle an invitation for him also? Considering the complaining he had done to Whitehead about Wittgenstein earlier in the term, Russell thought this might be a ticklish undertaking, but he was confident he could manage it. Once he thought about it, though, what really surprised Russell was that he would even be asking Wittgenstein to Christmas dinner.

In fact, the unconventional quality of the relationship — and the speed at which it was changing — rather shocked Russell now that he really thought about it. Russell was a popular don, and he prided himself on being on good terms with his students. His better students flocked to the Tuesday morning “squash-ups,” when he was available in his rooms to discuss anything with anyone who cared to come. Yet for all the seeming openness of this concept, these sessions were resoundingly closed by virtue of the gulf between what Russell knew and what they knew. But the real difference was not so much
what
they knew or didn't know but rather
how
they knew it. Indeed, Russell saw that it was not intellect or even imagination they lacked, but that clawing, irrational desire to know. This Russell could not teach, and not through any effort in the world could they acquire it. And not from mere lack of ability, but for a simpler, chicken-crossing-the-road kind of reason: unlike Wittgenstein, they had no real need to make the crossing.

And really, thought Russell, what could he hope to teach Wittgenstein in a classroom, especially when the Austrian had arrived having closely read him, and Frege as well? In class, Wittgenstein had now come full circle. In contrast to his temperamental outbursts in the beginning of term, railing about point after point he could not accept, he now said hardly a word. Not out of arrogance or petulance, he assured Russell, but because it was unfair for the two of them to carry on a dialogue that the other students could only half follow.

This partly explained why Wittgenstein dropped by Russell's rooms at all hours, sometimes as late as midnight. This at least was how Russell explained it to Parkham, the old don next door, when he commented on it. But how was he to explain Wittgenstein's Germanic sense of exclusivity, his tendency to expect, and exact, radically different terms than his other students? In anybody else, Russell would have found such expectations outrageous, but in Wittgenstein they somehow seemed commensurate with his character. Arrogance fit him. To Russell, even Wittgenstein's unreasonableness seemed relatively reasonable, as if he were subject to forces under which life's normal standards did not apply.

Still, Russell could see this was begging the issue. Obviously it was through his own witting or unwitting complicity that they had reached this point. Russell, after all, was the don. He could define the relationship—or could he? Because faster than Russell knew, Wittgenstein was reaching that point of being his equal, or even exceeding him in pursuit of what seemed a single unbounded dream. Russell knew this would only grow more difficult as Wittgenstein's powers came more sharply into focus—or rather, thought Russell fatalistically, as his own powers further diminished. Strangely, though, Russell found himself not caring so much. It was a gentle, natural process, not unlike falling asleep. True, he had a vague sensation of failing, but it wasn't so much a ruined kind of failing. Rather, it was a sense of ripening and unfolding, like a stream of light dissolving into the brighter stream of day.

At times, Russell thought he ought to resist this impulse in himself, but then he would wonder why, since it was inevitable. With feelings of envy mixed with apprehension and gratitude, he would look at Wittgenstein and think, He is like me, only more so. He is like me, but, unlike me, he has no practicality, no ability or willingness to compromise to the terms of life.

Still, there was more affinity here than perhaps Russell was willing to admit. Why, only a week before, after that unhappy afternoon in the hotel with Ottoline, Russell had seen his other woman. She came on him in Liverpool Street Station, on his way back to Cambridge. Russell felt the platform shake, then saw the blinding metallic glare, the Cyclops stare of the light at the head of the throbbing engine. A bell was slowly clanging. Flogging the air, spewing steam and blasting gritty black smoke, she was closing on him like an ecstasy. Russell shut his eyes and let her murderous darkness cover him. Like a giantess exploding with rage and hate, she sucked and enveloped him, crushing his frail bones under her tons of boiling, pummeling destruction. Inching closer to the platform, eyes clenched shut, Russell could feel that tidal pull, an urge terrific in its sweep to do the dark thing. But something stopped him.
Still too weak,
she chided.
Such a puling, pitiful weakling.
And then as the train stopped, with a long, sickening screech, he opened his eyes and found himself still standing so correct in his black Homburg and umbrella — standing there when, but for a few feet, he would not have been boarding his train but spraddled under her, hugging her oily black darkness like the thighs of a big woman.

B
UT
J
UST
as Wittgenstein was becoming the embodiment of Russell's dreams, others were getting wind of him. It started with Moore, who at supper in Hall near the end of term said:

Well, I understand your German is showing promise.

It was a perfectly innocent remark, and Moore, who as yet had not met Wittgenstein or even thought of making his acquaintance, meant nothing at all by it. Finding the chair beside Russell unoccupied, Moore was simply making a bit of conversation as he settled down to eat. Moore wasn't the first to ask Russell about Wittgenstein, who was already earning a reputation as a spoiler. Having heard Russell's earlier complaints about the German, Moore was merely expressing mild surprise that Russell's estimation of Wittgenstein should have changed so quickly.

In his present state of mind, however, Russell did not take Moore's remark so innocently. Quite the contrary. Russell was immediately suspicious, thinking that Moore was prospecting, looking to bring Wittgenstein over to his side. Concealing his unease with joviality, Russell said, Well, he has improved. We are getting along much better. But he's anything but easy. He's very volatile sometimes.

Russell quickly speared a bite of boiled turnip, chewed, swallowed. There was something staccato in his talk just then, as if with each phrase he were listening for an echo in Moore. Russell took a few more hasty bites, then continued. My word, he gave me a fit at first. A thoroughgoing skeptic. Extremely hardheaded. But he's really very bright, I think, and serious. Pleasant, too, once you get to know him. And incidentally, he's Austrian, not German. Trying to strike that balance between saying too much and saying too little, Russell added, I must say I was surprised to find he's quite cultivated — quite literary. Here Russell stopped himself from saying that Wittgenstein was musical, a fact that would have piqued the curiosity of the musical Moore, who loved nothing more than to sing lieder for friends in a stalwart tenor.

Flanked by portraits of Byron and Newton and seated before a High Gothic wall of ornately carved oak, they were eating at High Table, that long table that sat on a dais overlooking the echoing Hall, where the undergraduates supped beneath their noble eyes. Even before the meal began, the air would be steamy close with the enfolding smells of meats boiled to string and long-suffering vegetables whose culinary misfortunes were disguised in a menu of faultlessly spelled French. All gownsmen would rise as the dons, in procession, entered the beamed Hall. Like a college of cardinals in their black gowns, each clutching his cap under his right arm, they would assemble behind the long, polished table, then stand in prayer as the proctor, Sir Ambrose Preece, nicknamed Demosthenes, mumbled his way through Latin grace.
Pax
came the last word, followed by a crash as two hundred gownsmen sat down. Then commenced a louder din of knives and forks and hurling voices as platoons of waiters and kitchen trouts in greasy caps and aprons came slogging out with trays laden with hot serving dishes and pitchers slopping with water, milk and ale.

Moore had arrived late for this ritual in a rumpled, lint-specked gown and a mortarboard missing a tassel. Russell was already halfway through his supper, while Moore, famished as usual, was just settling down to his meal, his kneading stomach gurgling like bagpipes. Moore was not much for conversation while eating, though afterward, when he could smoke his pipe over a full belly, he was happy to talk at length with most anyone. Russell knew Moore's quirks but kept talking, partly to find out why Moore had mentioned Wittgenstein, and partly, in a half-conscious way, to devil him by keeping him from his supper.

But Moore had aplomb.
He
was not deterred. Draping a napkin over his paunch and asking those to his right and left to begin, please, the passing, Moore got down to the serious business of eating. For Moore, there could be nothing passive or fainthearted about such eating. It was not enough to tease off the lids of the serving dishes. Moore had to really get his nose down, so that the steam could envelop his face and start the digestive juices pumping. And it was a good meal today. Today and every day the food was good.
Whomp,
one glop of potatoes.
Whomp, whomp,
two more. And this while inclining his ear to Russell as if to say, Carry on, while he piled his plate with a bounty of boiled beef and onions, cauliflower still stewing in its own slime-gray juices and an equally indistinct compost of boiled turnips and carrots, topped off with a slab of bread impastoed with butter. Then, trying to quiet Russell with this Wittgenstein business, Moore said, Well, that's
good.
It's gratifying when, after all, they turn out. Changing the subject, he added, And I trust you're well this raw day?

A bit overworked with papers.

Ummm, said Moore with an eloquent shrug as the first heaping forkful found his mouth.

Compared to Moore, Russell was a gastronomical abstinent, hasty and largely indifferent to the mystical properties of food. Oh, Russell could be enticed by an especially good or elegant meal, especially if the fare was French or Italian, but he had not that love of quotidian, bland or even marginal food that is the mark of the truly stouthearted eater. Moore had, first off, serious
form:
the elbows squarely planted on the table, the gut pressed against the board, the plates well organized for maximum displacement of
food mass.
But Moore was no mere glutton; he was a gastronomical poet. There was a distinct tenderness in the way he would slide his knife under a cutlet or a slab of fish on a platter, gently lifting it with a wriggle so it came away intact, with full breading or skin. Moreover, Moore displayed impressive utensil technique, swiping the tines of his fork with his knife,
whisk-whisk
, like a chef sharpening a knife. There was the way he embedded peas in potatoes, not to mention the dexterity with which he herded together a burst egg yolk or an unruly pool of gravy, sopping up the leavings with a heel of bread, then sucking his fingers in that final
frisson
of finishing.

Moore was part of a long and lofty tradition there at High Table, that oak trencher dark with the grease and drippings of forebears who for some three hundred years had chopped and slopped, sawed and spooned, or sat in solitary mastication while plumbing the meaning of Milton's inversions or the upper strata of Aquinas's
Summa contra Gentiles.
Several of the sundry schools of eating were in evidence there that night. Sitting on Moore's right, for instance, was his fellow Apostle and former teacher, the philosopher and idealist John McTaggart. McTaggart, as a boy, had rebelled against God, denying his authority while yet fearing his space, which squashed him like a bug viewed through the wrong end of the ontological telescope. Because he was agoraphobic, McTaggart had spent his life stooping and as a result was bent and twisted, with a crablike walk that caused him to rub and rebound along walls, leaving his gowns and suit jackets scuffed and shiny and daubed with chalk.